I am designing a v front panel for a product with Front Panel Designer. The panel has a 30mm x 12mm rectangular cutout for a LED display. I found on your web-site that you also offer display covers in clear or red acrylic.

1. Question:
How do I design or specify a display cover in Front Panel designer?

2. Question:
I want the display cover to be inset into the cutout from behind. The glue edge width on the long sides has a max of 2mm, On the short sides the max width is 4mm. Ideally the material would be 2mm Acrylic, meaning the glue 'ledges' are 0.5mm thick. Can you do that?

3. Question:
Ideally I want Icon graphics on the front panel. Engraving is too course of a technology for what I need. When will you be able to offer printing capability? Either screen printing, Inkject printing or UV photoresist type printing should work for me.

Attached is an example for a 30mm x 12 mm display cutout. The aluminum front has a cavity on the backside to allow the acrylic display to fit in. I gave it a .2mm tolerance to ensure proper fit.The acrylic display has a cavity as well. This way both parts will be flush with each other. You won't need much glue since this already is good fit.

Our printing process is ready to launch. However we are still testing the best possible surface pretreatment.

I hope the attached files help. Please let me know if you need further assistance.

I would love to see a feature that would permit combining shapes in a "smart" fashion.

Grouping cutouts or cavities produces a Union function, where the combined outline is cut away. Currently, this is not done cost-effectively, as there machining charges are the simple sum of the individual shapes, not that of the outline or the total area.

A different and useful combining function would be an Intersection, where the result would be to cut out only the parts that overlap between shapes. A particular application would be a component outline (or cavity recess) for a circular D-hole connector whose body shape in a square overlaying a circle. We can create a through-hole cutout approximation as a Quadruple D-Hole, but not as a cavity.

(As a component outline, this would be an ideal shape to be tagged as Non-Cutting!)

Does anybody know of software that will let me convert files into HPGL either by importing and saving as HPGL or else straight file conversion? I have several formats I can save to using my design software for my logo, but none of them are .hpgl.

I've tried Cenon, Inkscape, qCad, and Libreoffice Draw and all of them either don't have HPGL or else don't properly save it in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I tried a USB install of 15.10, which allowed me to satisfy dependencies for the latest version of Cenon (4.04, I believe), but it still couldn't save a .plt file which was usable (always ends up just being a 32 byte file, with no data).

If anyone can help me, I would greatly appreciate it. It's possible that the vector data in my other file formats isn't plottable into HPGL format at all or something, but I really need assistance from someone more familiar with these formats and usage.

Enjoyed using your program and designed a small panel for a boat. Cost is great at $45.25 but the cheapest shipping option is through the 'bandits' UPS -- $33.25. Surely there must be a better/cheaper alternative? USPS does not appear as an option.